Hope you all had a magical weekend – we know we did! Gryffindor and Ravenclaw had a blast playing LEGO Harry Potter Years 1-4. Luckily, Rita Skeeter snuck in and recorded everything for your entertainment…

Have you ever wondered which awkward situations Quirrell and Voldemort got into the year the latter lived on the back of the formers head? Have you ever wondered whether there’s a wizarding school on Mars? Have you ever thought about the benefits of having a magical scarf which sort people into a sexual preference? And have you ever heard about A Very Potter Musical? Continue reading ‘What the Devil Is Going On Heeeree?’: A look at ‘A Very Potter Musical’

The Harry Potter franchise is inextricably linked with the names of several celebrities. Author J.K. Rowling has become a household name known by most who have heard of Harry Potter, and actors such as Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint have been propelled to stardom by way of the movie franchise. Even the directors of the films (there have been four different directors through eight films) have gone on to make other big-budget films, undoubtedly in part thanks to the success of the Harry Potter films. A less known contributor to the phenomenon of Harry Potter is, however, Continue reading Procuring Potter: A look at the man who brought Harry Potter to the silver screen

It can be difficult writing a best-selling book series while at the same time that book series is being turned into several successful blockbusters, but JK Rowling (a.k.a. Queen) did it with Harry Potter. And I for one love all the books, but does Rowling love them? It seems as if she might not be completely satisfied with them.

“There were a couple of the Potters and I definitely knew that they needed another year”. She said in a BBC interview in 2012. She also says that she might “rewrite” them; “And I read them, and I think ‘Oh God, maybe I’ll go back and do a director’s cut’, I don’t know.”

Wait what? Why didn’t she just wait another year to publish them then, you – imaginary reader – might wonder?

So one of the main reasons we are interested in Harry Potter (apart from the general awesomeness of the whole franchise) is its transmedia qualities. And as some of you may have noticed, our last two blog posts mentioned someone named Henry Jenkins. He is a scholar who, for some time, has worked on developing the concept of transmedia storytelling.

TRANSMEDIA STORYTELLING IN 100 WORDS OR LESS

Transmedia storytelling is the art of telling a story using multiple media platforms to tell different (mostly) independent parts of the story. Transmedia storytelling is ideal for stories that require a high degree of world building. One of the most famous examples is Continue reading Harry Potter is trans-WHAT?

We usually talk about Harry Potter fans as a unified group of people, but as any serious Potter-fan will know what Hogwarts House they belong to, already we will be divided into four sub-groups. The five of us, the bloggers behind this site, that is, are living examples of this already, as each House is represented within our group (Hufflepuff twice – figures). This phenomenon, as one might call it, has a lot to do with Henry Jenkins’s concepts Immersion and Extractability, which deals with how fans are able to either enter their preferred franchise (immersion) or trace parts of the fictional world into their daily lives (extractability).

So this post is essentially how we come to perceive the traits that have been linked to our Houses, and how we automatically connect with the given personalities.

So what exactly do you do with this information?

Extractability and immersion, according to Jenkins, has to with how we insert ourselves into the fiction and still use parts of this fiction even when we are not necessarily reading the books from cover to cover. So the division into Houses supports our being inside the story and how we connect with the “me-inside-the-story”. Our aliases (The Hufflepuff(s), The Ravenclaw, The Slytherin and the Gryffindor) are somewhat representations of this, in the way we use the extractability to the story as a means for communicating this blog. Meanwhile, the personality traits rub off on other’s perception of us and even to some extent our view of each other. Generally, we also make assumptions on which Hogwarts House people we meet belong to, based on the personality traits we think reflect on them. The extractability expands even to other franchises, other fictional worlds where we try to attach Hogwarts connections to other relatable fictional characters.

When it comes to the psychology aspect of this matter, the article “Harry Potter and the measures of personality” explores the extent of personality discovery, self-identification and relating to social worlds within the grasp of a Harry Potter sorting – taken from the Sorting Hat Quiz on Pottermore.com, the site edited by Rowling herself. This is of course the quiz that also confirmed our (all of the bloggers’) Houses. The Sorting additionally guides us through which characters to sympathize and relate with and the article explores this following various psychological frames of study, such as The Big Five and The Dark Triads (p. 175).

[…] Rowling’s organization of students into school communities or “houses” with particular traits may have influenced the self-views of millions of readers and provided them with fictional communities with which they identify. It seems feasible that readers would identify more with those characters who share the traits they actually possess.(Crysel et. al. 2015 p. 175)

This article works with how the traits linked to four Houses’ correlates with those people, who, like us, have been Sorted through the Pottermore sorting quiz. But to return to Dumbledore-quote in the beginning, I’d like to conclude this with noting how the Sorting actually might not necessarily reflect the true person that each individual turns out to be (just look at Severus Snape, otherwise known as Mr. Always, opposite for example Peter Pettigrew, or even Percy Weasley). Finally, even the Sorting Hat itself warns us of the danger of unnecessary separation and the importance to stand united, though parted into (in this case: four) groups.

You know the feeling. You’ve just sat down in your favourite armchair with a cup of tea, some cookies and Philosopher’s Stone, getting ready to immerse yourself in the world of Harry – when your mom/roomie/significant other walks in and exclaims: ‘Really? Again?’